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If you thinking about buying a 16GB Galaxy S4, you should probably think again: Samsung entry level superphone, despite being labeled as a 16GB device, comes with just 8.8GB of free storage or about 55% of the listed 16GB. Other smartphones, such as the 16GB iPhone 5 or 32GB Lumia 920, have almost 90% of their listed storage available for consumer use.

Even more remarkably, the Galaxy S4 pitiful amount of usable storage isn just a case of bloatware installed by Samsung or your carrier. If you take a virgin, SIM free, off contract Galaxy S4, it has 8.8 gigabytes of free space and no amount of deleting apps or photos will increase that figure. For some unknown reason, the Galaxy S4 reserves 7.2GB for system use. Around 2GB of that is the Android OS, and Samsung own software probably accounts for a few hundred megs but as for the remaining 4GB, your guess is as good as mine. Maybe there a factory restore image, a la Windows? Maybe there a ton of localization for each of Samsung apps? As far as the end user is concerned, though, a sim free 16GB Galaxy S4 has 8.8GB of free space period. (See:Samsung Galaxy S4: Hardware and software specs, dimensions, and more.)

Now, at this point, someone usually points out that the Galaxy S4 storage can be expanded via a micro SD slot but really, that beyond the point. The fact is, Samsung is advertising this phone as a 16GB model, at a price point to compete with other 16GB smartphones from the likes of Apple, HTC, and Nokia and yet it only has 8.8GB of free space. This wouldn be completely unacceptable if you could somehow free up some of that space, but you can Samsung is selling a 16GB phone that should be labeled as a 9GB phone there just no other way to slice it. Maybe Samsung is hoping to sucker customers into buying micro SD cards? (Which Samsung also makes.) Or maybe it just a case of some faulty software or hardware misreporting the available space? Samsung hasn issued an official statement, so we can only guess.

For what it worth, Samsung isn the only one perpetrating such crimes against humanity. Microsoft 32GB Surface RT, thanks to the bundled version of Office, famously came with just 20GB of free storage. There are plenty of Android phones from the likes of HTC and Motorola, especi free run 2 ally the 16GB models, that get close to 60% of their listed storage being available for use. Isn it about time that manufactures just started listing the amount of available storage?

As a footnote, it worth noting that there seems to be some variation between Galaxy S4 models. The international, octa core (Exynos 5) version of the Galaxy S4 has 8.8GB of free storage but early reports suggest that the quad core (Snapdragon 600) Galaxy S4 has 11.2GB of free space, which is closer to what you expect for an Android smartphone (the 16GB Galaxy S3 had a similar amount of usable space). In the next few days we should have a better ide free run 2 a of the usable storage on AT Galaxy S4, and eventually the Verizon model too. If it just the octa core version of the S4 that has issues, then perhaps it is just a software/hardware bug or maybe it something really crazy, like Samsung produced a special, very large version of Android that makes good use of all eight cores.

Now read:Samsung Galaxy S4 vs. iPhone 5: Which phone should you buy?

Tagged InKnowing the total capacity isn very practical. While they aren lying per say, I wouldn go as far as saying they aren in any way lying. They are definitely being misleading, which, to some, can be construed as lying, especially if the end user isn very tech savvy.

I have a rooted 16GB Note II, and even as a tech savvy user, I fully expected there to be about 10 12GB usable storage, but I don even get that. I mean, there is 11GB visible, but an additional 5GB of that storage is reserved for data and I can not access it to delete it. So only 6GB is actually usable. That is outrageous: 6 out 16GB is usable to me. If the device didn have an SD card expansion slot (like the Nexus 4), that would have been a deal breaker for me. If I had known that in the first place, even with the SD card expansion, I would have re considered. I know for a fact I need more than 6GB, and the actual, usable storage should have been up front and center, especially if it isn remotely resembled by the total capacity.

PCs have always been marketed this way as well. When you buy a laptop with an advertised 500GB hard drive, you are in no way getting 500GB of usable storage. As Erik above has said, this is how storage has always been reported. The reason it suddenly a big deal with mobile devices is because they ship with so little available storage capacity to begin with. That said, it would be nice if mobile device manufacturers were required to list total capacity and available space side by side to eliminate confusion. But I really don think getting riled up and grabbing pitchforks to stick it to the manufacturer is warranted, given that they simply reporting storage capacity the way it has always been reported since the dawn of the PC era.

The dawn of PC had separate program and OS diskettes you had to constantly switch, and when you bought a new disk that didn have a program on it, the total capacity and usable capacity were the same. In that case, I fully expect their to be a completely separate ROM for the OS and its applications like Android phones have traditionally had. And PC just a few years ago had their total capacity at least represented usable storage, so it wasn a big deal. (500GB HDD / 15GB for OS, still have 97% of the disk usable). With my Note II, I have 37% of my storage usable, which is a dramatic difference.

If you bought a car for fuel economy and it was advertised 70MPG, only later to discover that it got 26MPG, you be pretty pissed. But the car can get 70MPG, indoors without wind, and on a treadmill at a constant 40MPH point is that hiding the usable storage and advertising the total capacity is misleading, and while we shouldn get our pitch forks and torches, we should definitely let manufacturers we aren happy with this practice.

The dawn of PC had separate program and OS diskettes you had to constantly switch, and when you bought a new disk that didn have a program on it, the total capacity and usable capacity were the same. In that case, I fully exp free run 2 ect their to be a completely separate ROM for the OS and its applications like Android phones have traditionally had. And PC just a few years ago had their total capacity at least represented usable storage, so it wasn a big deal. (500GB HDD / 15GB for OS, still have 97% of the disk usable). With my Note II, I have 37% of my storage usable, which is a dramatic difference.

If you bought a car for fuel economy and it was advertised 70MPG, only later to discover that it got 26MPG, you be pretty pissed. But the car can get 70MPG, indoors without wind, and on a treadmill at a constant 40MPH point is that hiding the usable storage and advertising the total capacity is misleading, and while we shouldn get our pitch forks and torches, we should definitely let manufacturers we aren happy with this practice.

Um yes and no. I found out I was indeed using extra storage with backup images. CWM tends to make backups on internal storage hidden with the rest of the system files. It took me some digging to find out where it was with a disk usage analyzer manually looking up system files. I still only have about 11GB usable, with about 7.5GB free.

Here is a standard reading of my internal storage:And here is a reading of my /Data directory w/ rootAs you can see, I only using about 1.2 1.5GB (so, we call it 9GB usable to me), with the rest being related caches and data. I still a little irritated by this, but it not as bad as only having 6GB.

Did a 12 year old emo crybaby write that headline? That devices are coming with substantially less than advertised usable space is a problem I remember when I got my original 20GB Xbox 360 and discovered it only had 13 GB free space, a loss of 1/3rd of the drive but that headline is no better than some forum post written by some entitled brat who thinks that the only reason prices go up is greed, man!

I not sure what the enforcement mechanism is, but if you see adverts for hard drives and televisions, there is fine print explaining how space may be less or size of the picture. What preventing these devices from being labeled (8.8GB usable) other than it looks terrible? You couldn sell a pound of sugar with only 9 ounces in the bag.

Part of this is not the Hard drive makers issue, but units. They report the size in base where 1K = 1000 (GB), not 1024 (GiB). For a hard drive this is correct, because the number of sectors is not a base 2 requirement. RAM or FLASH on the other hand, is controlled by a Base of 2 (address lines). It Windows that normally reports sectors using 1K = 1024 incorrectly. Of course the HD makers WANT to use 1K = 1000, as that makes the larger. (GiB has a base 2 root, where GB SHOULD be base 10, so 1TB = 10^12 not equal to 1TiB = 2^40)

Wouldn it be a good idea to figure out why the space is being taken up before calling something a lie? Perhaps that 7.2GB of system reserved space gets reduced as free space is reduced?

I also agree with others that this seems to be industry standard. I would suggest though that the industry standard should change to also include disclosure of free space. It reminds me a bit of 40 (or so) years ago when the power of amplifiers was reported under no particular standard. The required disclosure to consumers can be changed.

The whole Microsoft Surface RT storage thing was blown way out of proportion. People can offload their recovery image to reclaim 3 GB. People can also delete the FREE Microsoft Office 2013 apps for more space (though I not sure why you would want to do that). I think the same may be true here. Samsung could be using it as a recovery partition or for temp files, paging files. Heck it could be reserving that space for emails or what not. This article makes assertions that are not based on facts rather based on speculation or unsubstantiated hyperbole.

Finally someone with a brain for pointing out the obvious that most people can even comprehend. free run 2 WTF is a partition? Is that like a room divider? it is, now go back to your Angry Birds game on your tiny iPhone and everything will be just fine

Seven leading supermarkets and their customers are finding it slow going to stop using plastic bags.Over the last three years supermarkets have reduced the number of bags from 870 million to 452 million, just failing to meet a government target to cut the number by half.The reduction drew words of praise from Environment Secretary Hilary Benn.is a great achievement by the seven supermarkets and their customers and it shows that by working together, we really can change our bag habits, said Benn.The British Retail Consortium has backed the government softly, softly stance.figures send a clear message: the voluntary approach is very successful and can lead to better informed customers and lasting change, said Stephen Robertson, the BRC Director General.But with environmentalists saying plastic bags can take up to 1,000 years to di free run 2 sintegrate and pose threats to marine life, birds and other animals, the UN has recently called for governments to take a more punitive approach.film single use plastic bags which choke marine life, should be banned or phased out rapidly everywhere there is simply zero justification for manufacturing them anymore, anywhere, said Achim Steiner, UN Under Secretary General and UNEP Executive Director in June.Given that a number of countries throughout the world have already outlawed plastic shopping bags isn it time Britain took a more interventionist approach to curtailing their use?This makes me very concerned. there is and has been alternative for quite some time now, but no effort has gone into placing it into law. when you consider not only the pollution done in landfills, but also in our waterways to animals aquatic life by the PLASTIC BAG ISSUE. and before you say its all rubbish (no pun intended) think ab free run 2 out asbestos lead, m free run 2 ercury, to name a few.Posted by Tony Report as abusiveIt such rubbish that people won take responsibility for there own actions. If people were clever enough all they would have to do is keep a few bags in the back of the car and unload their shopping straight into them from the trolley. That way if you so lazy and don want to carr free run 2 y bags into the shops with you then you can be even more lazy and just load the trolley without having to pack bags. It all comes down to laziness. I know some shops have started charging for them, but they all should even if it is just a TAX!!!!